


Penance

by shieldivarius



Series: Protocol [2]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Established Relationship, Multi, Post-Avengers (2012)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-14
Updated: 2013-11-18
Packaged: 2018-01-01 13:52:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 10,292
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1044731
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shieldivarius/pseuds/shieldivarius
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Maybe this was finally it. The acme of the penance she had to pay for the sins of her past. But a little thing like protocol wasn’t going to stop Natasha Romanoff from seeing the people closest to her happy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Natasha closed Phil’s office door behind her and glanced up and down the hallway, grateful to find herself alone for the moment. _Asceticism_ , she was so full of shit. She hadn’t managed to cheer Phil up any, either, and that might’ve been the worst part of it all. She hoped she’d at least talked him down from doing anything particularly stupid or likely to land him in the same spot she was in.

And Natasha really did need to talk to Hill about how ridiculous this was getting, for her to be pulling out old mission files—especially files from _before_ —and using them as ammunition in what was quickly morphing into a battery of attacks against Phil, Clint and herself.

Natasha had been piecing together, bit-by-slow-bit, an argument for keeping S.H.I.E.L.D.’s executive, bureaucratic nose out of their personal affairs since the whispers of this crusade had begun. It still wasn’t enough, though, for people like her and Clint and Phil, who lived the job and had little else. One misplaced file, one wrong, sideways look, and they would land deeper in it than they were even now.

Clint and Phil didn’t even have any idea of her intent and Natasha meant to keep it that way for now. She’d have to make them see the situation her way before she could take it further and that, too, was something she needed to be absolutely prepared for before she made any attempt at it.

Clint and Phil _said_ they wanted to fight back, but Natasha suspected if they realised it would require coming clean, they’d be less open to the idea. As in any delicate operation, there were a thousand more ways this could go south and blow up in her face than there were ways for it to succeed. 

She’d be that much more confident in her decision if the projected outcomes of any misfires didn’t include the end to exactly what she was trying to save. She’d accepted the necessity of the risk, though, and even if only a sliver of a chance existed that they’d all come out of this the way they’d gone in, Natasha would push forward, toward that chance.

And if that chance disappeared, well, she had contingency plans for her contingency plans.

Natasha collected the files she was meant to review from the lockbox in her desk and made her way back to her quarters to go through them. First things first: getting S.H.I.E.L.D. off her ass for something that was ancient history.

 

Clint appeared at her door without warning later that afternoon, not even bothering to knock before he let himself in. Natasha put her pen down, closed the English files she had spread out, leaving the Russian pages open. He hovered in the doorway, back pressed against the door, arms crossed. She stared him down. He stared back.

“Do I get to know what’s going on, or are you and Phil planning on keeping it to yourselves?”

“It doesn’t concern you,” she said. “And sticking your nose in would be a stupid move at this juncture.”

“Calling me stupid, sweetheart?” he asked. He crossed the room and dropped onto the bed next to her, not quite pressing against her but coming pretty damn close.

“You shouldn’t be here,” she said. “And if you continue to be here when you shouldn’t, then yes, I’m calling you stupid.”

He grinned, suggesting he knew she meant it and didn’t care.

“One civilian dying? That’s the worst they could dig up to go after you? Come on, Nat.”

“They’re targeting myself _and_ Phil, Clint.”

“Yeah? And you know what they’ve got on me? The entire fucking—“

“ _Don’t_.” Her hand clenched, nails cutting into her palm. “That’s not going to come up.”

He tapped her papers. “Just because you can’t handle it if it does—”

“It’s not going to come up because it wouldn’t make any sense—”

“The entire ship had kill-on-sight orders. I checked.”

Natasha rolled her eyes, attention back on her notes since the conversation had already turned from anything useful to a level of self-pity she couldn’t deal with sincerely.

“Phil’s in trouble, Clint. It’s not only us anymore, and he has a lot more at stake.” She could go anywhere, had safe houses in case working for America went south on her. Had contacts internationally who owed her favours she could call in to get herself established elsewhere, and there was no shortage of people who would come calling if whispers started up that the Black Widow was freelancing again.

It wouldn’t be fun, having agencies like S.H.I.E.L.D. back on her tail, but now she had intimate knowledge of their internal workings, too, should she need it.

“Nat,” Clint prompted, like he could tell where her thoughts had gone. He could come with her if they had to run. “Nat, this is an HR issue now. Just that, okay?”

He put his hand on her knee and Natasha stared at him, past him, for a long moment.

“S.H.I.E.L.D. is Phil’s entire life. I don’t want him to lose that,” she said.

“This place is _our_ home, too, 'Tasha.” His fingers dug into the muscle above her knee, massaging it and trying to force the tension out. He tapped the pages scattered on the bed again. “Whatever you’re doing here, don’t drive us away, okay? Don’t convince yourself we’d be better without you, or whatever.”

“Phil would be better off without us,” she said. “His job would be safe, he wouldn’t be looking at some asinine inquiry because of my fuck up, and—”

Clint’s fingers dug into her knee, squeezing instead of massaging, now. “Shh,” he said. “Phil’s fine. You don’t get to decide what’s good for him, and neither do I.”

She dropped her head onto his shoulder. He was right, of course. When it came to S.H.I.E.L.D., at least, Phil rivalled her in getting people to do what he wanted them to. He knew what he wanted, even if he didn’t necessarily chase it down, and he didn’t let people get in his way.

Clint’s hand found the small of her back, rubbed slow, absent circles there. He’d become a lot more tactile lately, it seemed. Had she, too?

 

Natasha cajoled Clint out of her chambers and somehow convinced him to actually go home that night—or at least to leave base. She hoped he’d gone home. Phil, too. She even allowed herself the fantasy that they’d gone to the same place and spent the night together, though she knew they hadn’t.

She woke the next morning, a lot later than she’d intended, to the sound of her cell phone buzzing.

“Romanoff,” she said, hoping her voice didn’t sound as bleary as her mind felt.

“Agent Romanoff? It’s Steve Rogers.” As though she could possibly mistake that voice, even if she was half-asleep and it’d been over a year since she last heard it.

“Natasha’s fine, Steve.”

“Ma’am.” His polite refusal of the familiarity made her smile, even as she rolled her eyes.

“To what do I owe the pleasure?” she asked, because when Captain America called at… 10 o’clock in the morning (shit, was it really that late?), even she couldn’t just snap at him to get to the point. Besides, he hadn’t earned that treatment.

“Something’s come up. I can explain it to you when you get here. We’re putting the Avengers back together.”

The Avengers? It was too early for this shit.

“Who’s we?” she asked pulling the phone away from her ear long enough to check if she’d missed any other calls that might’ve made this _not_ come out of left field. 

Nothing.

“I can’t say over the phone.”

She laughed. “Then even if I could make it, I’d be out. Call Agent Barton. Unless the world’s going to end today, I’m bound by red tape, regardless.”

A muffled sound; Rogers’ hand brushing across the mouthpiece, and a long silence, broken only by the rustling and crackling of the phone line while he conferred with someone on the other end. Stark? Who thought they had the authority to put the Avengers’ Initiative back onto active status? What had happened to make someone think it necessary?

“Could really use your help on this, Ma’am.”

“You have my answer, Captain.”

“Hope you’re doing alright, Ma’am,” he said, and the phone went dead. Natasha lay back on her pillow and waited for it to buzz again.

Clint texted her ten minutes later.

_‘Say yes.’_

She ignored the more insistent buzzing when he followed up her silence with a phone call.

 

Wednesday, and an email appeared in her personnel inbox from a junior agent in HR informing her of a mandatory psych session that she was expected to be at, scheduled for that afternoon. Natasha smiled to herself. She hadn’t even had to set that one up—who was playing into her hand?

She snatched the paper airplane Clint tossed across the bullpen at her before it could catch in her hair and glared at him as she unfolded it.

_‘SAY YES.’_ Read the block letters inside, the ‘yes’ underlined with a mess of scribbles. She crumpled the paper up into a ball and lobbed it at his head. (He caught it.)

 

Natasha spent a lot of time alone. What had once been necessity had slowly morphed into her preference; the more she had to hide, the less willing she was to be herself around others, the easier it was to spend her small moments of leisure by herself. Coming into S.H.I.E.L.D. after so much time spent working by herself and only for those who could afford her had been trying (at best) and a complete shock to her system.

Immediately after being brought in, Natasha had spent two months in a comfortable, maximum-security cell in the dungeon-esque basement of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s New Mexico base. They’d treated her well. _Too_ well, considering she’d been straddling the line between international terrorist and asset. (She’d since learned that S.H.I.E.L.D. did a lot of dealings with people in that position. Most of them were ruled not worth the risk and ended up dead.)

Those two months had been hell. Solitary confinement didn’t mean much when half the time psychologists or doctors were visiting her, and the other half she was so unaware that she wouldn’t have known if she had company or not. The deprogramming had been harsh, left her a trembling mess, sweating in a ball on the floor, or pummelling her eyes with the heels of her palms. She’d wanted nothing more than to escape—her body, her mind, her past; anything that would have helped her get rid of the fear and mental anguish of being unmade.

She’d anglicised her name permanently as soon as the confinement period had ended and she’d regained her lucidity. Become Natasha Romanoff legally, and swallowed Natalia Alianovna Romanova into some dark hole in her psyche, to be accessed only when she was needed, like all of the characters and personalities in Natasha’s roster.

The problem with working for S.H.I.E.L.D., with being Natasha Romanoff, was that she had learned to need people. Learned what it meant to be lonely instead of merely alone, and learned to recognise the difference. Natasha Romanoff was dangerously close to being in love, and had developed all of the weaknesses that that term entailed.

Natalia Romanova, however, had no such hang-ups.


	2. Chapter 2

The best tip Natasha had ever come across for dealing with shrinks was to steer clear of them. That tip didn’t help when working for a government agency that required regular reassessments of its assets, because executing people for a living could take its toll.

The runner-up for best tip was ‘don’t get caught lying’ and Natasha lived by that rule. Had, for as long as she could remember. And if she often took strides to be more honest than not now (at least with certain parties), well, lapsing back into old habits was a lot easier than breaking them.

Which meant that, yes, she knew there were rumours all over base that she and Clint Barton were very involved. Of course they were unfounded, Natasha knew S.H.I.E.L.D.’s rules and wouldn’t compromise her position here. The questions that followed, about her sex life, were put to a stop after the second with a glare and flex of her fingers.

Did she think she was of sound enough mind and well enough to be operating in the field? 

Of course.

Did she think the same of Barton?

He was as same as he’d ever been. She trusted him to have her back.

And Phillip Coulson?

He was her primary handler. He’d made calls that saved her life before and, as far as she knew, he trusted _her_ in return. 

The session ended.

Natasha only had a little more insight into what direction this might veer off in than she had before. It didn’t matter. She knew what direction they were taking it; how they wanted this to ultimately go.

They were setting themselves up for failure if they thought they were going to succeed.

 

“Agent Romanoff!” Coulson didn’t usually bark, at least not at her, but there wasn’t much other way to describe his tone of voice when he called down the hall after her.

Not quite at attention, Natasha turned to face him. “Sir?”

He caught up to her, gestured for her to resume walking, falling into step at her side. A thin paper file was in his hand, beneath a tablet that held his rapt attention.

“Coulson,” she prompted when he hadn’t said anything and they’d nearly walked the length of the corridor. He indicated with a tilt of his head that they should take the next right. The rest of the walk to his office, up until his holding the door for her and stepping back to let her in before him, was made in silence.

“Have you heard anything about an active Avengers mission?” she asked once the door was shut, cutting across whatever he was about to say.

“Not officially sanctioned as of yet, but I have,” he said, sitting on the couch instead of behind his desk. She perched on the edge of the cushion next to him. “But that isn’t all I wanted to speak with you about.”

She laid her hand on his leg, just about his knee, walked her fingers up his thigh. He cleared his throat. She leaned forward, propped her elbow on her knee and her cheek on her hand to peer up into his face. The index finger still on his thigh traced idle little circles there.

He glanced up, toward the camera in the corner of the room. Natasha ignored the hint until he placed his hand over hers and gave it a gentle squeeze.

“Are you upset?” he asked.

“Should I be?” She pulled her hand away, resettled herself so she faced forward, toward his desk instead of looking at him.

“You have every right,” he murmured, as though she hadn’t moved and wasn’t shutting him out at all. “But I meant upset with myself or Clint.”

“Of course not.” Tone modified to mollify him. Phil didn’t give any indication of whether he’d seen right through her or not—and she wouldn’t be worried about that with many others, but this was Coulson and he was perceptive and knew her—but he rose and moved to sit behind his desk.

He stared her down for a moment, Natasha meeting his eyes, unblinking. Finally he unfolded his hands and referred to his tablet. 

“I’m surprised you haven’t chased Barton down to make sure he hasn’t gotten himself too deeply into anything,” Coulson said mildly.

“He’s a big boy, Phil. If the world’s not going to end, I’m not too worried about him.” 

“It would help a lot if you were around to corral them.”

“Issue orders or change the subject, Phil.”

His brow dropped in a furrow, corners of his mouth slowly moving down in a sour frown and he clasped his hands together in front of his mouth, pensive, resting his weight forward with elbows on the desk. He made an aborted gesture, a jerk to the side that was his catching a guilty shift to look at the camera. “Sweetheart, what’s going on? I’m getting all kinds of mixed signals from you right now.” The _‘And I know you’re doing it on purpose’_ was silent, but sat heavy in his eyes nevertheless.

Natasha shook her head. “We’re at work.”

He raised his eyebrows at the succinct nature of her response.

“Is that all, Sir?”

“You can go, Agent Romanoff. But be forewarned, I’ll be sending Agent Barton after you regarding the Avengers Initiative the moment S.H.I.E.L.D. is officially involved in their assignment. And you will be actively assigned to the team should the situation become more severe.”

“Sir.”

 

Part of her felt badly, brushing Phil off as she had. That part of her was buried easily enough, though, and certainly wasn’t the loud part of her brain just now, or even anywhere near being a part of her dominant character. Besides, it had been wrong of him to try and approach her at work with the climate being what it was.

Still…

Natasha sighed, twirled her pen in her fingers and stared down at her paperwork, letting her vision slip out of focus. Absolutely unseeing, she let scenarios play out in her mind. Tribunals, hearings, meetings, court marshals… Any and every direction she needed to be prepared for.

It wasn’t easy.

Nothing worthwhile ever was (though whether or not this was a worthwhile endeavour was something else altogether and not entirely anything she wanted to contemplate right now).

Barton’s desk sat empty, chair pushed halfway out where he’d abandoned it that morning. Natasha hadn’t checked her phone in a few hours. She suspected the inbox was full of demands from him, wanting her there with him while he chased down whatever potentially-(but not yet)-global-crisis inducing thing he was chasing down.

Her thoughts paused there.

Shit.

She knew _exactly_ what he was up to—Clint Barton wasn’t hard to read—and as usual it was a stupid idea, likely to cause him more trouble than it solved. 

And she needed to be at his back. Because she knew he’d be at hers without her even having to ask.

Fuck. She needed to get her head out of her ass. She needed to strike a balance here, one that she hadn’t yet been able to find, wasn’t sure if she knew _how_ to find. But she could do that, she _could_ , now that she’d recognised the need.

Natasha grabbed her phone and scrolled through the backlog of messages. A full half of them read the same thing, _‘SAY YES’_ sent at ten-minute intervals because Clint was a pain in the ass.

The final message he’d sent, and the one she was stuck staring at, read _‘Stop being such a bitch.’_

She didn’t hesitate before calling him.

_“Figured you weren’t talking to me,”_ Clint said in lieu of a greeting. 

“Coulson suggested you need babysitting already,” she said, listening to the noise around him and trying to work out where he was. Rushing air, static. No shouting, no explosions. His breathing steady, counted; definitely covering someone somewhere, but whether or not there was actually any immanent danger…

_“Yeah?”_ he said.

Distracted, too. Definitely in the middle of something, she hadn’t caught him at a great time, but if she wasn’t too late to drop herself in the middle of things, that would be okay.

“What’s your status, Hawkeye?” 

_“Hang on,”_ he said, and she pulled the phone away from her ear at a torrent of static as he covered the microphone. She was still able to hear him shout something at Stark, even if she couldn’t make out the words because of his hand covering the mouthpiece.

_“Kind of in the middle of something, Natasha,”_ he said when he came back. _“Nothing big,”_ he added, _“Cap and Stark are here, but—“_

“Tell me where you are,” Natasha said, rolling her eyes. “And what I can do to help.”

_“It’s really nothing—“_ a rush of air and a bit of a twang of the string as he released an arrow, _“and we’re way the hell out in Jersey. But can you stop by and make sure Lucky’s okay?”_

“You want me to check on your dog,” she said, deadpan. 

_“Practically your dog, too.”_

“ _Это глупо_ , Barton.” This was ridiculous. He was pissed at her and being passive aggressive about it. 

_“Oh, yeah,_ I’m _the one who’s making this ridiculous.”_

“I’ll check on Lucky,” she barked, and hung up the phone. It took a lot of self-control to not hurl the thing at the wall.

 

With her presence no longer wanted at whatever op Barton and Rogers were working, Natasha sat at her desk and stewed for another half hour, making annotations to her notes and reading the pages over and over until she couldn’t focus on them any longer. Then she got up and went for a walk, a nattering voice in the back of her head assuring her that sleeping alone wasn’t so unfamiliar.

Besides, Barton was a sprawler and took up most of the bed at any given point in time. 

Maybe they, all three, needed some time apart to really figure things out. Maybe there was a reason arrangements like theirs weren’t accepted in regular, common, “civil” society.

Though it wasn’t like any of them had normal, dinner-table-conversation careers, either. The kind of career that was one of a thousand she could feign having at the drop of a hat, but that was never meant for her to have in actuality. She’d get bored, anyway.

Hyperaware that she teetered on an edge here, one where falling over the cliff meant sinking into one or another personality, or, worse, losing the distinction between them entirely—something she worried had happened without her noticing—Natasha climbed into her car. She tightened her hands on the wheel, rested her forehead against the upper curve of it and took in a couple of long, deep breaths.

This was her problem then, she reflected as she collected herself and headed out to Brooklyn. Her life was _comfortable_ here, something she’d never been able to say before S.H.I.E.L.D. She was _happy_ with Clint and Phil and sometimes, for moments, it was like she… forgot. And she couldn’t forget. Not who she was, and not what she’d done. Not for a life that she didn’t deserve.


	3. Chapter 3

Stuck in traffic, Natasha flipped radio stations until she stopped on one discussing _“the mess Tony Stark’s_ Iron Man _and_ Captain America _were making in New Jersey.”_ Little mention of Clint, but there probably wasn’t that much for him to do, anyway. Between that and the lack of flashy costume, she and Barton had mention in less than 50% of press coverage on the Avengers—and they preferred it that way.

The drone of the voices on the radio gave her enough noise to focus on until she pulled up in front of the rundown building that housed Clint’s off-site apartment. Then it was up six storeys worth of stairs because the elevator took twenty minutes on a good day, and Natasha let herself into the place. 

“Hey, Lucky,” she greeted, brushing her hand across the one-eyed dog’s head as he sniffed circles around her knees. The dog wagged his tail, tongue hanging out of the side of his mouth in a pant, and trailed after her on light paws to his food and water bowls. 

Natasha refilled the water bowl and set it back down with a fond roll of her eyes for Barton’s propensity toward collecting strays. The elderly lady across the hall took care of Lucky for the most part, making sure he had breakfast and dinner and went out a couple of times a day. Natasha thought he should just let the lady have the dog, but Barton wouldn’t budge on it. He insisted that Lucky stopped the place from seeming too abandoned at the end of a long op.

Natasha let him have that, but she still didn’t like anyone else having a key to the place. She was barely comfortable with herself and Phil having keys (Clint had pointed out that they were more symbolic than anything else, since a locked door wasn’t exactly going to stop her from getting in, anyway).

She moved through the tiny apartment, tossing a couple of old Chinese takeout containers into the garbage, wrinkling her nose at the odour wafting from the bag and quickly knotting it and dumping it down the shute in the hall. Then she grabbed a plastic bag from the cupboard and, after taking a quick shower and getting dressed again, water dripping from her hair, put anything and everything into the bag that was hers or Phil’s and might be particularly damning. 

It ended up being far more than one bag that she packed into the trunk of her car. 

 

Clint hadn’t particularly sounded as though he wanted to hear from her again before he was ready to, so Natasha didn’t call. It was weird, and uncomfortable, to think that mere days ago they’d been together, _standing_ together, and against this, and that now they were here—apart, and with no end to the separation in sight.

Stupid, that she felt like she couldn’t handle it. They were busy people, and their schedules rarely coincided. They spent a hell of a lot more time apart than they did together. Clint’s apartment, though, and the belongings scattered end-to-end throughout it, had maybe, more than anything else so far, brought home just how much a part of each others lives they were on a level far deeper than work.

Her phone rang, clicked through and was answered by the car’s Bluetooth before she could glance at the caller ID. “This is Romanoff.”

“You left base?” Phil.

“On my way back,” she said. “Clint wanted me to check on the dog. Was someone looking for me?”

“Not to my knowledge,” he said, and this was him calling as Phil, not Agent Coulson. Natasha tapped her fingers on the steering wheel, waiting for a couple of teenage girls to finish crossing the street in front of her so that she could turn.

“Is something wrong?” she asked when he didn’t say anything further, and forced the tapping fingers to still. She could pinpoint almost exactly when she had started developing nervous tics. She was going to have to work on removing them.

There was a definite hesitation on Phil’s end before he replied, “Nothing new, anyway,” in a forcefully cheery, Agent Coulson voice. 

“Not like you to call for no reason,” she said, trying to open up the conversation even as she knew she was the one shutting it down. Communication. They needed to maintain channels of communication amongst them, and she’d already managed to mess up things with Clint.

“Just checking in,” he said, and it was in that same professionally jovial voice. “I’ll still be here when you arrive back on base, working late.” The line clicked dead, the low melody of the song on the radio came back on.

Natasha stopped at a red light and rested her forehead on the upper arc of the steering wheel.

 

_‘I’ll still be here when you get back,’_ had been an invitation, at least. 

An inexplicable feeling of trepidation still filled her as she made her way through base, though, leaving the eclectic articles of their lives packed neatly in the trunk of her car. Phil met her in the hallway outside of his office, and she waited half a moment for whatever bit of bad news he had to drop on her this time. He didn't say anything, though, just nodded that they go back the way that she had come. 

"I understand what you're doing," he said at length. "And whether you'd like to believe it or not, so does Clint."

"We can't have this conversation here."

"We can, and are. I've gotten clearance for you to leave base again."

She nodded, if only to show that she'd heard him. "I thought you'd been removed as our handler."

"All but," he agreed, "But regardless of who's leaning on her, Director Hill and I are still friendly, if not friends."

That wasn't the impression that Natasha had gotten, but she let it slide. Phil's words were interesting. Hill didn't know, as far as she was aware, anyway, about their little _ménage à trois_. She and Clint had worked hard to keep things that way. If it was someone above the Director of S.H.I.E.L.D. who was putting pressure on Hill, though, that might mean that someone else _was_ aware of Phil's involvement with them. That would be dangerous.

It wasn't something that Natasha hadn't considered before, but this gave it a lot more weight.

"You're suggesting I go home, then?" she asked lightly. Stark Tower, for all that she would have to deal with Stark while she was there—and she definitely wasn't in the mood for that—might actually give her the kind of privacy she needed right now. Tony had proved over and over that his firewalls were better than S.H.I.E.L.D.'s.

She approached and dismissed asking Stark for a favour. 

"I think it would be best. I need to debrief the team who went out today, I can give you a lift."

_Phil Coulson, you wonderful man._

"I should move my car over if I'm going to be staying there for a while," she murmured. He nodded, raising a shoulder in a fraction of a shrug.

"That's fine," he said, and, shit, she was an absolute idiot. That hadn't even been a subtle invitation. Natasha brushed her fingers against his elbow, barely touching the fabric of his jacket. A tiny quirk of the corner of his mouth accepted the apology.

“Carpooling might be the better option,” she said. “But I still need to get a few things from my car.”

He nodded, expression impassive.

 

Phil seemed amused, but also more than a little concerned, by the collection of things Natasha had manage to gather in her short stopover at Clint’s. He pulled together his own small bag out of the pell-mell, dropped it into the footwell behind Lola’s driver’s seat. 

“Stark seen this car?” 

Phil winced in answer, wearing a long-suffering expression as he backed the car out of its spot. “We could fly in and take over his landing pad.”

“We could,” she said, amused. “But that’s not your style.”

“I’m feeling reckless.”

Natasha pursed her lips. He was serious, on some level. Phil glanced at her.

“Not a fan of that plan, I see.”

“We’ve enough problems without your flying a car through Manhattan.”

“Great way to beat traffic, though.”

“Phil,” she snapped.

He tapped his fingers on the gearshift. After a moment, she covered his hand with her own, twining her fingers between his, and squeezed.

“It’s his father’s tech, you know,” he said, and squeezed back. It took her a moment before she realized he was back to talking about the car.

 

The Avengers were a S.H.I.E.L.D. response team but weren’t, strictly speaking, employees of S.H.I.E.L.D. Or at least, half of them weren’t formally on the payroll, though Stark, Banner and even Thor (technically) held the title of Consultant. The awkward, in-between status of the team meant that Clearance levels went out the window and Natasha could sit in on the debriefing, even those she hadn’t been involved in the mission.

It also meant she was getting dirty looks from the rest of the team for not showing up, though. Well, from Tony and Steve, anyway (Tony had cracked a ‘cat dragged in’ comment when she’d trailed in after Phil—Steve just kept a steady eye on her). Clint wasn’t looking at her at all.

She kept her features schooled and impassive, resting, as she listened to them debrief, making mental notes to bring up to Phil later. They hadn’t needed her—there wasn’t a single place where her skills would’ve been more useful than any of theirs in the entire recount—and she’d known that from the beginning, but it was nice to have it reaffirmed.

It ended, and Pepper came in and pulled Tony away 'before he could start tinkering' and Steve wandered out on his own when he realized there was a tension in the room he didn't know the source of, and the three of them were left alone.

"J.A.R.V.I.S., please stop surveillance for the next fifteen minutes," Phil said, closing his portfolio.

Or as alone as they could be in Avengers Tower, with a programmed-by-Tony-Stark A.I. running everything.

Clint moved his feet from the empty chair beside him and up onto the table.

"Somethin' I should know about?" he asked, folding his arms over his chest, and Natasha noted that he was still only looking at Phil and ignoring her entirely, as though they were five and in the middle of a squabble on the playground.

"I thought we might all need to talk," Phil said.

Clint shrugged. "Everything's fine here."

Natasha rolled her eyes. Phil glared at both of them, and Clint stared him down but she found herself looking away. And this, _this_ , was why the fraternization policies existed. Because their personal issues were affecting their work issues and their work problems were chasing after the tail that was their personal problems and it was all one big, frustrated circle that was starting to spiral out of control.

Something inside of Natasha broke, clarity ringing through her like the peal of a mourning bell. 

"This was never going to work," she said.

Clint looked over then, a snap of his head to the side with the damning words.

Natasha pushed herself up from her seat, hands flat on the table to keep herself stable. Maybe exhaustion had made the words come out. Maybe she'd finally just had it with it all. It would be easier, _so much easier_ , to go back to the way things had been before.

Both men stared at her. 

"You're giving up?" Clint said after a moment. "Now? Just like that."

Natasha clenched her right hand into a fist, fingernails pressing into her palm. "Sometimes you have to accept the signs," she said. "Instead of fighting tooth and nail against them."

"The fuck is wrong with you this week?" Clint demanded. The front legs of his chair banged against the floor when he dragged his feet from the table and righted himself. "You've never just _given up_ on anything in your entire fucking life. I thought we were more important to you than that. What, the past two years have been some fucking game to you?"

"I'm tired," she snapped. "I'm tired of being the only one who's trying. I'm done taking on S.H.I.E.L.D.'s protocols and the World Security Council by myself.”

“Natasha,” Phil whispered.

She looked at him, her heart breaking into pieces even as she pulled a stoic, uncaring mask into place. There was a lost look in the depths of Phil’s eyes, but he looked resigned, too, like he’d known this was coming. And maybe he had, because that was the same look he’d worn when she’d revealed that she’d removed all of their belongings from Clint’s.

“I’m not telling you what to do with your lives,” she said, heading for the door.

“Hey!” Clint shouted after her. She ignored him, the rage and pain in his voice, all of it.

“I’m just telling you that I can’t be part of it anymore.”

It was a strange feeling, leaving the room with half of her feeling lighter than she had in months, and the other feeling as though a crawler had grabbed her ankle and was pulling her down into a sinkhole.


	4. Chapter 4

Work was easy, so damn easy, for the next two weeks. Natasha spent most of her time at base or on her floor of the Tower, keeping to herself when she wasn’t required to be anywhere else. 

She attended more mandatory psych evals. Phil— _Coulson_ —filled out and signed off on forms verifying that she and Clint were in no way involved. Hill backed off, and her superiors must’ve backed off of pressuring her, because she didn’t even seem to be watching and waiting for them to slip up.

She hadn’t tried to figure out how much Clint and Coulson were still seeing of each other. It wasn’t any of her business. She’d quite firmly removed herself from her relationship with them, and even if she sometimes lay awake wondering how she’d worked herself to that point without realizing, it didn’t give her the right to pry.

But she missed them, and even if she couldn’t pry, she could observe that much. She missed them, and if they were still involved, she wanted to make sure they stayed protected and flew under the radar. 

She also, maybe a little, wanted to know why neither of them had confronted her about her having stormed out. Phil— _Coulson_ —she understood it from, but Clint she knew didn’t have that type of emotional self-control. They’d been professionally distant, the both of them, and maybe that was why she found it so easy to rationalize keeping her distance. She didn’t think it was that they didn’t care, but if they were respecting her space, she certainly had to extend to them the same courtesy.

And she still had a hard time believing all it had taken was a break-up—was that the right word for what had happened?—to get S.H.I.E.L.D. to back off altogether. The other shoe dangled above them, waiting for the laces that hung it to be cut so it could fall on their heads. Natasha could only walk with her head tilted back, neck strained, for so long before she rammed into something because she wasn’t looking ahead.

 

_“Agent Romanoff, Agent Coulson is in the penthouse recreation room and requests your presence.”_

Natasha glanced at the clock in the corner of her computer monitor and frowned. “Just me, J.A.R.V.I.S.?” she asked, looking over her work and saving the file before signing out of the remote S.H.I.E.L.D. server she’d been working in. Following the protocols were more habit than anything that would stop a resident of this building from getting into what she’d been working on if they really wanted to access it, but Natasha had become rather fond of protocol lately.

_“As far as I am aware, Ma’am.”_

“Thank you,” she said absently. They didn’t have a meeting and before she wouldn’t have blinked an eye at Coulson coming by for a social call, but before he would also have come directly to her door, or called her cell phone. Using the A.I. as a go-between was new and discomfiting.

_“Agent Coulson requested I not inform you of this, but Agent Barton is present as well.”_

“Thank you, J.A.R.V.I.S.,” she said, and she should have been used to how almost humanly perceptive the A.I. was but it still unnerved her a little. Still, thank God for Stark’s ridiculous paranoia and the programming that allowed J.A.R.V.I.S. to have the purview to give out information he was asked not to reveal as long as he wasn’t ordered to conceal it by Stark, explicitly.

Natasha stood by her desk for a moment, collecting herself, before she went upstairs. She’d been expecting them to confront her eventually. She’d been expecting them to do it together, if only so that Phil could temper whatever bruised outrage Clint spewed out. But she’d been expecting it to happen so much sooner than this. The strides she’d taken to return to herself had been measured and careful and immense over the past two weeks.

Maybe if she took enough deep breaths now, she wouldn’t have the wind completely knocked out of her and end up flat on her back when she got upstairs.

 

Sure enough, both of them were dressed casually when she entered the room. Phil’s lack of a suit told her of the personal nature of this call more than anything else. Natasha dropped her shoulders and forced herself to relax, pretended she didn’t notice anything amiss, and stopped her stride across the rec room in a neat, perfect diagonal, across from where Coulson sat in an armchair. Clint lay sprawled out on the couch next to it.

From her peripheral vision she caught Clint rolling his eyes at the parade rest stance she adopted.

“At ease, Natasha,” Phil said, sounding sad.

She relaxed a fraction, made herself look down at Coulson instead of staring over his head at the far wall. “You wanted to see me, Sir?” she asked, feeling antagonistic and difficult and hiding it beneath formality in answer to their ganging up on her.

“Cut the crap,” Clint growled. His sprawling pose was calculated to be at ease, confident and relaxed. The tension in his body and voice was anything but.

Natasha looked at him, expression bored and indifferent and challenging, daring him to make this more awkward, to increase the thick tension enclosed in the air by the triangle of their bodies. 

“Why don’t you sit?” Phil suggested, gesturing at the empty chair she stood next to. She glanced at it, thought about it, and slowly lowered herself into the chair. They could at least be at the same level for this. 

Natasha arranged herself with her legs crossed, letting the back of the chair frame her instead of perching on the edge despite how tempting that was. If she perched on the edge, she’d look too much like she wanted to run off at the first free moment—and while that might be the case, and she knew everything she did telegraphed that to them anyway, she could try and hide it for the moment. 

Clint’s anger sat across his face like a shadow, darkening his features, eyes flashing like lightning cutting through the clouds. Phil, in contrast, remained cooler and more controlled. He wasn’t angry, or if he was, it wasn’t at her. If anything, the same sadness that had sat with him for weeks, that sadness that kept being dug more deeply inside of him, a well filling with water instead of a pit being backfilled, still clung to him. 

It was easier to focus on Clint’s open anger than try and deal with the horrible sensation that threatened to swallow her every time she met Phil’s eyes, but he had called her here—not Clint—so she tried.

“Natasha,” Phil started. He had a hand on each armrest, a conscious effort to hold himself open rather than closed off, and his fingers dug the tiniest bit into the fabric beneath them. “I want to apologize for calling you up here officially to discuss personal matters.” And here he folded his hands together, bridging the two armrests with his forearms. That hadn’t been what he was going to say. She believed he wanted to apologize for _something_ , but that wasn’t it.

She nodded anyway.

“Clint and I have been talking,” he continued, and Natasha found herself very carefully controlling that odd finger-tapping tic she’d developed. She knew that her hand had twitched, though, in enough of a tell if they were watching for it—and they most certainly were. “Probably more than we did at all as a unit when we were dealing with this, and, Natasha, there is no way to make up for making you feel like we weren’t supporting you.”

Natasha’s eyes burned. Phil leaned forward in earnest, sincerity brimming in his features and his desire to make amends clear. Even knowing regret would swallow her later, Natasha stomped on the olive branch.

“This, now, doesn’t change anything, Phil.”

Clint hit the couch, smacking the wooden seat frame, the ‘thump’ of it not muffled by the fabric covering at all. Lips pressed together and thin, Natasha turned her attention to him. 

“Problem, Barton?” she asked, icy.

“Yeah, I’ve got a problem,” he said, and pulled himself up off the couch. “Got a problem with you acting like you’re the only one who’s been affected by this. We were in this _together_ Natasha, and that was fine until you decided you were going to cut me out and treat me like I didn’t have any right to know what you were doing.

“You were only taking on the system alone because you decided that’s the way you were going to play it,” he spat. “Going around us so we couldn’t interfere with whatever fucking secret plans you’d come up with.” He jabbed his finger through the air, punctuating his points with angry gestures.

Phil stood, closed the distance behind Clint and put his hand on Clint’s shoulder. Clint stiffened but didn’t shrug him off. They looked good, standing there in solidarity, even if it was against her.

“I have alternatives,” she said. “You don’t.”

Clint shook his head, jaw clenched like his gritted teeth were the only things keeping his features from crumpling, the only thing holding his anger anchored. 

“You go back to freelancing, you’ll be dead in six months.”

Natasha smiled, just a little bit, “Was that a threat, Agent Barton, or a challenge?”

“If it’ll—”

“Stop,” Phil said, voice quiet but carrying over Clint’s nonetheless. They both looked at him, Natasha accepting having to stare upward, ignoring the itching feeling that told her to stand and put herself back on an equal playing field. 

“You’re not angry with each other,” Phil said. Natasha raised her eyebrows, and Clint snickered.

“Right now? Yeah, that’s what this is, Phil.”

Natasha looked away, just for a moment, and rubbed a finger over her eyelid before looking up at them again. “I’m not mad at you, Clint. I’m not mad at either of you.”

Phil’s lips turned up in a wry, sad smile. “I know.”

“Whatever,” Clint grunted. He pulled away from Phil and dropped back onto his couch. “I’m pissed at you.” His voice was rough and confrontational, still looking for a fight and frustrated that he wasn’t allowed to have it. 

Natasha nodded, accepting. That burning sensation still lingered in the corners of her eyes, threatening tears she refused to spill. She was in the right. Even if her heart clenched like someone had a hand wrapped around it and was squeezing, following the goddamn protocols and keeping themselves safe and protected by the system was the right thing to do—especially with Clint’s history, never mind her own.

Looking a little disgusted with the both of them, Phil crossed to her and sat down on the arm of her chair, more than close enough to touch but keeping his hands folded and tight to his body. 

“You can stop punishing yourself,” he said, focused on her, using his tender, careful, Agent Coulson negotiator voice, like she had a bomb strapped to her chest. Maybe she did, even if it was only a metaphorical one. Phil still acted as though she held all of the control in the room, and maybe she did. They’d come to her, after all, and even if they’d tried to make this on their terms, they were as confused by all this as she was and doing a worse job of hiding it. “You’ve done nothing wrong.”

She looked away. “I’m not…” Was she punishing herself? Did trying to protect them while cutting herself out fall under that category? Did Natasha, somewhere deep-seated in her psyche, feel like she was less deserving of happiness than they were?

Because she wouldn’t deny that much to herself, at least. She’d fought as long and hard as she had because being with them made her happy, and gave her a sense of belonging, and seeing them smile—separate or together—and knowing he had something to do with that happiness gave her the sense that, maybe, she could bring more to the world than chaos and secrecy. That she had more purpose than murder and espionage. 

Phil extended a hand, moving it slowly and where she could see it so she wasn’t surprised by his touch to her back. Two fingers made sure, firm circles against the tension in her neck, and Natasha became aware that her shoulders were hunched up, her posture starting to curl in response to her own damn vulnerability.

Still looking frustrated, expression like a thundercloud, Clint came to sit on her other side, shifting her over and crowding her out on the seat of the chair until they were solidly squished against each other with her half on his lap. He pillowed his head on her shoulder. She leaned up against Phil’s side and breathed deeply, focusing on the feeling of being pressed between them, letting the tension slide from her body.


	5. Chapter 5

A ten-minute long dog pile on a tiny little chair wasn’t enough to patch up their relationship, but it was a start. Clint continued to cling to his anger, though, using it like a shield against anything Natasha might throw at them next, and she didn’t particularly blame him for that. She also recognized that it was, at least in part, her own behaviour that had sparked Clint acting this way.

A day later she tapped lightly on his door, letting herself in when he didn’t respond. 

“I received a mission brief about half an hour ago,” she said, gaze flicking across his supine form on the bed. His hands were under his head, holding it up just high enough to look at her.

“Solo?” he asked, a bit of a furrow to his brow. 

Natasha nodded, crossed the room and perched on the edge of the bed to see him better in the dimness of the room. “Croatia.”

He sat up and stretched a bit. “Dark?” he asked. She nodded again. Clint scrubbed a hand over his brow. “When do you leave?”

“Two days,” she said. Then, “Clint, I wanted to apologize.” That was why she’d really come, and hiding behind work to gather the courage to broach the subject only worked for so long. 

“Don’t,” he said, rolling his eyes. He shifted to sit beside her, leaned in so they were nearly nose-to-nose. “It’s okay. I’m over it.”

He rested his forehead against hers and she pulled back until she had him back in focus. “You’re not.” 

“I’ll get over it. I know what you were doing, and I don’t want you freaking out about us and distracted while you’re dark and alone on a job.”

She smiled. Their foreheads touched again and he tilted his head in, dragging his nose against hers until he’d shifted enough for their lips to press together. Natasha inhaled slowly through her nose, moving her lips against his in response. They exchanged languid kisses, remaining tame despite how long it had been since they’d last really touched each other. Clint had a hand on her waist, holding her in place, and one of her hands had found his shoulder, her fingers stretching to brace against the side of his neck, the only contact points beyond their lips.

“Two days, huh?” he asked, pulling away. She smiled a little, fluttered her eyelashes at the tone. 

“Two days.”

He stretched out an arm, flailing at the bedside table where his phone lay slightly out of his reach, until he managed to scoot up the bed enough to grab it. “I’m calling Phil.”

 

In the movies, in novels, in any and every bit of romantic media, apologies acted like magical panaceas, putting everything back as it had been, and a couple having sex after an argument was a shortcut representing forgiveness.

Even if Natasha gobbled up romance novels (in private) for their escapism and laughable lack of realism, and even if she recognized the stupidity of being deluded enough to think that any of those tropes applied to real life, the feeling of contentment that spread through her at being pressed between Clint and Phil again almost made her believe in them. 

“How’re you feeling?” Phil asked, pressing kisses into her hair. She laughed softly, turning toward him and resting her head on his outstretched arm.

“Dangerously overconfident,” she murmured.

Clint, laying on her other side and tracing lazy patterns across her hipbones and stomach, kissed her breast. “Not sure if that’s better or worse than distracted.”

“Better,” she said.

Phil twirled the ends of her hair around his fingers, letting it trail between them, and she gave him a questioning look.

“What is it?” she asked. Clint pushed up on one elbow and looked across her. 

Phil shook his head. “I don’t want to be the one to sink the mood.”

“Mood’s gone, Phil,” Clint said, reaching down over the side of the bed. He came back up with his pants, as though to illustrate that point.

“You’re worried about Hill,” Natasha said.

Phil nodded, his gaze far away, staring off into the dark, empty sky beyond the window. 

“She backed off,” Clint said, not dismissive but argumentative—not rejecting the thought outright, but in denial. “Paperwork’s filed and everything.”

As one, she and Phil turned to look at him, and Natasha was sure her expression of disbelief was _nothing_ compared to Phil’s. Clint groaned, got up off the bed and pulled his pants on. “Right,” he muttered.

“We haven’t been discreet,” Phil said. 

Natasha scoffed, sitting up to grab the bed sheet and pulling it up over herself and Phil. “We’ve been discreet,” she argued. 

“Not discreet enough for S.H.I.E.L.D.”

Clint sat back down on the edge of the bed, and if the mood hadn’t been gone already, it was now. “What’re you thinking?” he asked. “Because if you’re about to leave I’m going to flip.”

“No, no,” Phil said, reaching across and putting his hand over Clint’s. “But I’m going to make a request.”

“No,” Natasha said automatically, reading his face and his tone and knowing exactly where Phil thought he was going with this. “You’re not throwing yourself in the middle of this.”

“I _am already_ in the middle of this,” he said, and he wasn’t quite shouting but he’d lost his characteristic mild tone. He sat up, forcing Natasha to sit up as well or be the only one still lying back and looking up at them. “I am _tired_ of the two of you acting as though I need to be protected instead of being an equal, informed participant in this relationship.”

She and Clint exchanged glances. “Phil, you need to calm down,” Natasha murmured, her gaze travelling to the scar on his chest. 

“I’ve been calm. I’ve watched you become more and more distant, hoping you’d come to your senses and come back, and I’m done with it.”

Natasha frowned at him, stared him down and waited. Phil fumed, close to the boiling point, and she laid her hand over the scar instead of just staring at it. “Your heart, Phil.”

“It’s fine,” he snapped. It wasn’t. It raced beneath her palm and there was no way to glance back at Clint and confer with him without pissing Phil off further. 

She couldn’t claim she had no idea how Phil had been feeling these past couple months. She knew, and she knew they’d all felt the same to varying degrees, but her and Clint’s insistence on keeping him separate, and on making sure the tide didn’t rush in and sweep him up with them, had been more penalizing than they’d intended, regardless of its success in achieving their ends.

“We don’t want you to lose your job, or be reassigned to the Savage Land, or something,” Clint said. 

“We both owe you too much,” Natasha added. She let her hand fall, the tips of her fingers trailing down his chest before she fully pulled it away. 

“You don’t owe me anything,” Phil said. “Neither of you owe me anything, and you both need to get away from that mindset. What neither of you has let me look into is filing the paperwork to exclude us from the fraternization policy. There are workarounds.”

“For polyamory?” Natasha challenged.

“The forms for domestic partnership definitely exist,” he said, giving her a flat, unimpressed look. “I can look into it further.”

“Come on, Phil,” Clint said, and rolled his eyes. 

“If I file the paperwork for the two of you—”

“That’s not fair,” Natasha said over him. “No paperwork. We make them look the other way without any official channels, if we’re going to do this at all.”

“That hasn’t worked so far,” Phil reminded her, and most of the anger had left him already, and Natasha wasn’t sure if that was because he was masking it, or because he really had only wanted to be included in their discussions. She suspected a bit of both, and knew the outrage he’d just shown still lurked at least close enough to the surface that it wouldn’t take much to rekindle it. 

“Maybe not,” Natasha said. “But maybe we’ve been going about it wrong. Now that you’ve officially filed the paperwork, you can’t rescind it. There’s nothing in the fraternization policy that excludes recreational sex.” 

“You’ve read it?” Phil asked. He sounded surprised and she let an eyebrow slide up her forehead in answer.

“Are you suggesting more sex as the solution to this?” Clint asked. He sounded amused. “Because I can’t say no to that, but I can’t see how it’s going to work, either.”

Natasha lifted one bare shoulder. “Tell me what the climate is when I get back from Croatia,” she said. 

“One requirement,” Phil said. “We keep to the tower, as much as possible, with little spill over.”

“Away from S.H.I.E.L.D.,” Natasha said, agreeing. Clint’s expression turned mulish. “No, Phil’s right,” she said before he could object. “As nice as it is to be alone, together, your apartment is the farthest thing from secure, and Phil’s isn’t much better.”

“So, what, we hide out under Stark’s protection? We aren’t doing anything _wrong_.”

Natasha crossed her arms. “You know that’s not true.”

“He’s going to demand answers if Phil moves into the tower.”

“I’m not going to move in,” Phil said. “We’ll keep the arrangement we have. It works for us. We’ll just make sure that extended periods of time spent together are spent at the tower.”

“We don’t think it sounds great, either,” Natasha added. His arms crossed over his chest and telegraphing his discomfort, Clint stood and looked around the room until he’d found his shirt. 

“Do they have conjugal visits if you’re in jail for treason?” he asked, voice harsh and sarcastic, matching the jerky motions he made getting his shirt over his head. “’Cause that sounds good too, if we’re discussing it.”

Not looking back at them, he left, slamming the door shut behind him.

“ _Clint!_ ” Natasha shouted after him. “You _unbelievable idiot_ ,” she growled under her breath, falling back onto her pillows and knowing he wasn’t coming back.

Phil groaned and ran his hand over his head. “We should’ve seen that coming,” he muttered. “I _did_ see that coming.” He threw his legs over the side of the bed and, naked, hunted down his clothes.

“He’ll come around,” Natasha said. “Come back to bed. Give him half an hour to cool down, and then we can go after him.”

Phil looked over at her and Natasha, having absolutely no intention of leaving the bed and chasing Clint down because it was likely to lead to a fight she didn’t want to have in front of any of the other Avengers, pointedly straightened the sheets and duvet around her.

Still standing in the middle of the room, Phil looked lost. “This shouldn’t still be happening. Why is this happening to us?” he asked, and he sounded so lost that Natasha threw the blankets off again, rose and crossed to him. She pressed herself against him, wrapping her arms up around his neck, and he pulled her flush to his chest, bending and burying his face against her. 

“You want me to go after him?” she asked, rehearsing the confrontation in her head. She knew what Clint was going to say. She could have the argument with herself, and it would be about as effective as having it with Clint, but that didn’t mean that she would skip having it for Phil’s sake. 

“We should both…” He trailed off with the shaking of her head.

“I’m about to leave for a couple of weeks. Let him be mad at me and get over it, Phil. Make sure you spend time together when I’m gone. That’ll fix this faster than anything else.”

He didn’t reply, just held her more tightly, while she wished there were an easy way to protect both of them from all of this confusion and uncertainty. There wasn’t. 

Nothing worthwhile was ever easy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There will be a third and final part to this, from Clint's POV, to wrap it all up.
> 
> http://shieldivarius.tumblr.com


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